Lata Mani

Sheba Thayil, writes about Lata Mani's latest book Sacred/Secular and her interesting experiences after her accident.

FACE TO FACE

Inner journeys

SHEBA THAYIL

Author and cultural critic Lata Mani talks about how a horrific accident changed her lives in more ways than one.



I was being taught to open to every one of life’s experiences as being inherently meaningful. We all live in such a productivist environment that unless we are seen to be doing something, we do not recognise the value of our existence.

To be reading Chris Hitchens’ God is not Great and then get a copy of Lata Mani’s SacredSecular is one of those moments when you have to believe there is no such thing as coincidence. Their style is as wildly differing as their substance but when you learn that to Mani, God is the love that visited her on a hospital bed, you tend to understand better than ever what the Hitch meant when he said religion is man-made. Mani sees it from another angle. “The sacred,” she says, “came looking for me.”

Mani was a teacher in America when Something Happened, as Joseph Heller once so heartbreakingly told us. In the same Helleresque way, what happened was, in one sense, tragi-comic, in another full of the most dramatic consequences you could imagine. It led Mani on an inner journey with her A-ha moment being that All is Connected, and a physical one that brought her to Bangalore.

While SacredSecular, essays on faith, globalisation, cultures, may be hard-going for some readers, with phrases like “an urban conurbation” and “poststructuralist theory” being thrown in as readily as sentences like “Was India’s trajectory properly mapped as an in-progress evolution from religious pluralism to secularism, a progression disrupted by Right-wing forces (whether conceived of as being obscurantist or post-modern)?”, there is a reason for it.

Focused attention

“I was trained in cultural criticism, as a historian, so it is much more natural for me to write non-fiction than to write fiction. Additionally, about 15 years ago I was in an accident and had a head injury. The result was that a prolonged period of concentration is difficult. In that context, I developed the short essay as a form with which to experiment and explore whatever I wished to write about. In fact, my second book Interleaves, the story of my head injury, is told by juxtaposing short pieces and the story developed across them. I adopted the same form for this book

“It may be hard on the reader but it enabled me to take a fragment of something that is far more complicated and pay the kind of attention to that fragment that is possible in about five or seven pages. The hope is that the reader may start anywhere but, as the essays unfold, the reader is invited to come on a journey with me, and the intention is that one can open up some questions for discussion without being didactic, or preaching, to try to build the process of contemplation into the very form.”

She doesn’t think she was searching for something, or that a happy accident, so to speak, supplied a missing link into her life. “I was your typical Indian rationalist, deeply formed by Catholic school from nursery all the way to University (Jesus and Mary College in Delhi, Sophia Polytechnic in Mumbai). On the other hand, I was extremely disenchanted by institutionalised religion where a certain notion of godliness seems to be very comfortable with shooing away the beggar outside. I found that was very hard to reconcile with so I was never much drawn to religion.”

And yet, she found another kind. “In the context of the head injury, there was a spontaneous experience which sometimes happens to people with head injuries. It took me into a different dimension. The process invited me to enter another realm. I could have refused, but the love I was experiencing was so deep and profound I felt I had no choice.”

To some, this may sound like la-la-land, but to Mani “It was not MY emotion, but a feeling of love coming towards me and I sensed it enveloping me and I was startled, bemused, not fully understanding it and yet simultaneously, and here’s the mystery, deeply recognising it as something familiar. How can something you have never cognitively experienced before seem so familiar?”

The thoughts “arising in my consciousness, I use these words advisedly because I was not thinking them”, centred around an invitation to “die out of everything you’ve known yourself to be and be born anew”. She accepted. Few of us would have gone the same route, seeing a vengeful force at work in the absurd horror that gave rise to the situation she found herself in.

Right before she was hit (by a Pepsi truck driven by a disturbed individual) on her way to teach Women’s Studies and History at UC, Davis, with a colleague, she had been talking about the riots post-Babri Masjid in Mumbai. She had just finished saying “I am very angry with God” when she saw His vengeance bearing down on her in the rear view mirror. How did she really see it? “My first experience of something arising in my consciousness was the words ‘It’s not time to die yet’.”

Home-bound, she was later “prompted from within to record my experiences partly as a way of documenting a counter-narrative to the usual sense that an injury or a cataclysmic event like this is an unmitigated disaster. I was being taught to open to every one of life’s experiences as being inherently meaningful. Not to seek their meaning in terms of social approbation or what society would consider useful or productive. We all live in such a productivist environment that unless we are seen to be doing something, we do not recognise the value of our existence. In a sense, my experience was requiring me to take that social construction head-on.” Somewhat literally. “The inner voice kept saying it is important to speak of the texture of this experience, of the nature of the suffering…. open to it as an experience, just as inherently creative, useful, valuable, as the experience of being a painter, writer, mother, doctor, academic.

“I was starting to leave the world of the body which had kept me very engrossed and to move outside of it. As I started to encounter various social issues I wanted to write about it. It seemed to me my prior training was not irrelevant. People see these kinds of moments as a complete rupture, where the past falls away and a new life has begun. My notion of interconnectedness was being deepened and made more profound as a potential for understanding things. This book is the fruit of that experiment.”

Mani tried another by returning to her homeland. Her voice becomes soft as she says, “I love India. I always thought of my stay in the U.S. as an interruption. I refused to buy a vacuum cleaner because I was always ‘heading back’. As soon as I started getting better, I did. I feel nourished by India, challenged by it, I feel in deep conversation with it.”

Her newest venture is in the realm of children’s books, brought on by a promise to her four-year-old nephew. These stories are “not plot-driven,” she says. “Children are so driven by activity. My most cherished memories of my childhood are doing nothing, looking at the sky, tracing some shapes in the mud, throwing a ball up and down, lots of time for my mind to breathe and float like a kite in the Bangalore sky. Children these days are so programmed, taken from one activity to the next and I thought ‘Is there a way in which one can write stories that built in a sense of…contemplation in a very simple way that invites children to do nothing?’ And yet there is so much richness in allowing your mind to wander and see your relationship with Nature.” That is what she has tried to do with The Tamarind Tree and her latest The Spider’s Web, about a boy learning the difference between looking and seeing, through his father’s camera.

In Delhi, for the launch of SacredSecular, Mani held a workshop for feminist activists on bridging the sacred/secular divide. What does one have to do with the other?

“Feminists have dealt with religious bigotry and religious violence but issues of faith have not often been addressed. (After the Babri Masjid riots), discussion at some slums had the women saying, ‘For the first time, you are allowing us to talk about our faith.’ That gives us some sense about the disjunction between the language which feminism has been comfortable, for reasons that are historically comprehensible and specifiable, and the language that people that feminists would most like to work with, use in speaking about things that are meaningful to them, which is not to say that only the sacred is most meaningful to most women.

“It is clear to feminist activists that a certain secular critique of communalism, of religious bigotry, has run its course. We need a new imaginative language to address the issues we are confronting right now…One way could be to share the possibility of a different kind of conversation,” which is what her book tries to sustain.

“My life,” she says, “reads like the life of Job.” But only if someone reads the Bible with discernment and understands the parable as it is meant to be understood, she adds. She is grateful for having unearthed “a fecund source of inspiration for navigating the tiniest things about life, cooking, dusting, cleaning as well as broader questions on how to live, how to take one’s place in a world that is so complicated that it is not always possible to know what one’s impact could possibly be. How can one embrace the very real humility and modesty of a single life and what it can offer alongside a recognition that no act however infinitesimal is irrelevant? How does one walk artfully and with a lightness of touch (knowing this)?”

Her learning has freed her to speak of things as she sees them. “I offer them as a poet might offer a poem, or a painter who might offer a painting.” What fascinates her is “The idea that one cannot be the last word, but like the monk with his bell, in the process of writing a piece, just float something into the air and see who might be interested in receiving it.”

The success of Mani’s life may be that the child who saw thoughts as kites grew up to be a monk with a bell.